FLICKR, JORGE LÁSCARTwo papers on Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV), appearing in two different journals this year, have some suspicious redundancy. Both presented data from the very same patient in Saudi Arabia, who died of a lab-confirmed MERS infection. Both drew the same conclusion: that camels are a likely source of the man’s infection. But what the papers do not share are authors.
“The double publication—the first in Emerging Infectious Diseases (EID) in March, the other in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) this month—has pitted Saudi Arabia’s former deputy minister of health, Ziad Memish, against infectious diseases specialist Tariq Madani of King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah, who recently became the Saudi government’s chief scientific adviser on MERS,” ScienceInsider reported yesterday (June 10).
German virologist Christian Drosten of the University of Bonn apparently helped both teams, landing himself on the author list of Memish’s EID paper and in the acknowledgements of Madani’s publication in NEJM.
But many, including Drosten, have questioned the link between the man’s virus and a sample taken from the man’s own camel may have been the result of lab contamination. The direct link ...
